IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/socsci/v96y2015i1p34-48.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Establishment of Party Policy Committees in the U.S. Senate: Coordination, Not Coercion

Author

Listed:
  • Michael H. Crespin
  • Anthony Madonna
  • Joel Sievert
  • Nathaniel Ament-Stone

Abstract

type="main"> We seek to determine if institutional changes designed to increase intraparty coordination influenced observed levels of party unity in the U.S. Senate. In particular, we test competing claims regarding the effects of establishing party policy committees following the adoption of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946. First, we examine Congress at the vote level by looking at the overall proportion of votes that could be classified as “party unity votes” before and after the establishment of the policy committees. Second, we employ a micro-level analysis by examining individual senators’ procedural party support scores. We find that members of the majority party were more likely to have higher levels of procedural unity after the adoption of policy committees. The establishment of party policy committees in the Senate played a role in helping party leaders coordinate activities, advance a legislative agenda, and maintain high levels of party unity on the floor by better structuring procedural votes.

Suggested Citation

  • Michael H. Crespin & Anthony Madonna & Joel Sievert & Nathaniel Ament-Stone, 2015. "The Establishment of Party Policy Committees in the U.S. Senate: Coordination, Not Coercion," Social Science Quarterly, Southwestern Social Science Association, vol. 96(1), pages 34-48, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:socsci:v:96:y:2015:i:1:p:34-48
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/ssqu.12104
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Bone, Hugh A., 1956. "An Introduction to the Senate Policy Committees," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 50(2), pages 339-359, June.
    2. Anthony J. Madonna, 2011. "Winning Coalition Formation in the U.S. Senate: The Effects of Legislative Decision Rules and Agenda Change," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 55(2), pages 276-288, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Andrew J Clarke & Jeffery A Jenkins & Kenneth S Lowande, 2017. "Tariff politics and congressional elections: exploring the Cannon Thesis," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 29(3), pages 382-414, July.
    2. Sarah Binder, 2020. "How we (should?) study Congress and history," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 185(3), pages 415-427, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:socsci:v:96:y:2015:i:1:p:34-48. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0038-4941 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.